Exposure to small particle air pollution: mapped by city
Another cool and simple web application. Maybe not cool. More like frightening. It should also be a little reassuring to see how lucky the U.S. is in terms of air pollution. By all means, look at your town, then at North America, then at India and China. People might say that our environmental protection is not needed because they do not notice pollution, but it is exactly the opposite. Air pollution in the country has been held at bay because of the EPA. We are lucky to have had interest groups who 'pump the brakes' on unfettered development. If we had not taken these precautions when we did we would be the 100 to 150 range.
U.S. passenger jet nearly collided with drone in March: FAA
Well great. This is not going to help public opinion. There are a few things to note on this though. First, they call it a drone. This was not the kind of drone that the military uses and may not have been flying itself. It is possible it was being controlled by a person on the ground. Second, this drone was violating airspace altogether. It is not even a matter of drones. If you flew a kite in the area that this drone was in you would be violating airspace. If you threw a baseball in this area you would be violating airspace. So that is where we need to get appropriate regulation. I would like to see a small commercial airspace for drone use. A permit or licensing process would be nice. That way there would be a certain amount of accountability. A certain amount of paperwork to track down inappropriate users.
I ordered parts several days ago to make a quadcopter. A bulk of those parts came in yesterday.
This one also has a camera so I can test using a camera for some of the remote sensing and modelling techniques that I have talked about and thought about.
The transmitter looks pretty serious, but it is actually a lower end model. I bought this one because it has some scale-ability. I can use it on future builds and it quite few channels so I can get into sexa and octo copters without having to invest in another transmitter.
One thing that my wife and I had a good laugh about this morning was that with all of my double checking and online carts and lists, I managed to forget propellers...
Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Luckily the thing will not fly without all the other parts that have not come in, so I have plenty of time to get them. I am sure I am going to find out that I am missing all kinds of parts.